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The Ghosts of Senate House is one part of a creative research project led by Sarah Sparkes. It serves as an archive for uncanny, apocryphal stories emanating from Senate House. These stories formed part of "a Magical library for the 21st Century" an archive of writings, recordings, artwork, artefacts, and other contributions, which was first shown at the University of London as part of The Bloomsbury Festival October 2011.

Tuesday, 6 September 2011

A Senate House member of staff reports the following anomalous experience; they were leaving work and descending a staircase one evening in mid-June 2011:

" ...there's a ladies loo on that floor so I decided to use it. The stairs were quite quiet but you could tell there was a function going on in the vicinity from distant chatter. Not too close like floor below but somewhere in the building or perhaps Stewart House.

When I entered the loo, standing by the window to put my rucksack down I could hear there was some that function going on again which confirmed it for me. Voices were a distant murmur. You could tell they were adjacent to the loo.

As I exited the loo there was a huge, long, loud belly laugh from something in front of me and directly in my face and very close to me like someone standing immediately in front of me. The voice was far louder than the distant voices I heard by the window and far above the flushing sound of the loo as well. I couldn't see anything. It was almost deliberate as if having waited for me to exit the loo. I froze to the spot and was gripped with confusion.

There was clearly an invisible woman laughing loudly. I could even detect an accent as there intermittent mumbling (I feared curses actually). It was accented like the Gypsies that used to sell me flowers as a child. I became very hot as my face was quite red and sweaty from the panic of trying to work out where the voice was coming from and my stomach was in knots. The sound lasted no longer than 15 seconds and died away. I could then only hear the din from the party/conference by the window.

I convinced myself it was just a sound from the party/conference and began to wash my hands. As I was washing my hands the voice started laughing again behind me and then echoed around the room up to the ceiling and into the other toilet. There are two toilet cubicles. The door was open in the other loo so no one can hide in there. It was like someone using the Tannoy system to laugh but not that microphone sound just loudly projecting their voice.

The laugh started with huge volume and died down to tittering echoing around. I ran outside the loo to see if it was one of the cleaners and down to 2nd Floor toilet to see it there were any women or a single woman in there, there was no one around so no one was playing a trick on me. Was definitely odd as it was so close it could only be coming from inside the room.

The next evening around 5.30pm I used the same toilet again and heard a woman laughing. At first I thought it was the same thing happening again but this time I heard a second voice and could tell voices were coming from the floor below. I was then able to compare the sounds which convinces me that the first experience was closer and louder, almost in my ear and the 2nd was distant."